Category: About money

10th grade, I saved up THB 3,000 for my first Nike basketball shoes. At 30, I start to see people save up 20% for their home down payment.

Once we start to make a paycheck or receive our credit card, that stopped. Everything seemed so easy now. The wait is gone. So was happiness. It was both less and short.

Fun money gave some of that that back: having a thing or service to want and the progression to reach that. The result feels happy, the progression feels happy, and the anticipation feels happy.

Side note: that basketball shoes was made for indoors, so it didn’t last long. I never bought another sneaker or sports shoes surpass 3k.

I decided to change the way to allocate fun money, from once a year to once a month.

• Original: split the difference after hitting the annual savings goal.
• New: allocate 5% of each regular income cycle and 50% – 60% of irregular income cycle.

Problem of fun money with “leftover” from annual savings:

1. Unable to forecast how much will be received, no clear goal.
2. Long wait time, easily side tracked by impulsive spending

With allocating in each income cycle, the purpose is to act as a reminder to refocus whatever the purchase is. There’s a goal to save towards to and cycles to evaluate the expense.

It used to be

5% of income that all goes into a cash envelope. We pull money from it if there’s any large purchases for the parents or flush into red envelop during Lunar New Year.

The experiment

Luckily, our parents are in good financial shape and that gave us room to plan for the future.

The idea came from Linda. We’ll experiment with splitting it half-half. Half in cash for the sort term expense; half in ETFs for long term cash flow.

The success factor is whether 2.5% is enough to cover the sort term expense.

November is a month with multiple large one time bills; we’ve almost doubled the monthly expense from NT$82,558 of October to 165,212 of November. There are 3 expenses that contributed to the inflated number.

1. MacBook Air M3 13-inch (NT$35,600): the old Macbook Pro 2015 wasn’t able to keep up anymore, it was the right purchase since I had a chance to run it for an interview over Teams on Chrome. A task that the old Intel i5 just couldn’t keep up.
2. TOTO toilet and sink (NT$30,750): replacing a crack on the previous toilet, this is obviously for safety reasons. Sink was not a necessary expense, but it was nice to see them in a set.
3. Gym membership (NT$26,000): this is on Linda, some tasks and habits are easier when there’s a professional tracking it.

It accumulates 55% of the November expense; without those, the November expense is 76,138. The baseline expense is actually lower than October.

Some observations

• I’d pay more for convenience. I could have paid less price for the toilet with a lesser known brand, but TOTO was a 10 minute walk from home and I don’t have to figure out the drainpipes myself. It’s just easier since I was finding time to meet work, family, and interviews.
• The family number. Linda and I merged our income numbers on the same spreadsheet, it required a habit tweak, relocating accounts, and discussions for both of us. I wonder if it’s true that two will work faster than one.